DataONE supports community metadata standards through a series of crosswalks that map each metadata standard to a common SOLR schema. For example, even though the title of a data set is found in different locations in FGDC, EML, and ISO19139, all are mapped to a common title field in SOLR. The SOLR schema that we map to is described in the DataONE Architecture documentation. The mappings from common metadata standards are also described for EML, FGDC, and Dryad as examples.

When an incoming metadata document is received, it is parsed and key fields from the metadata are extracted and indexed in SOLR according to the crosswalk, making them available in the metadata search service, and through https://search.dataone.org.

The SOLR metadata crosswalk among the various metadata standards that DataONE indexes does not contain all fields from all schemas. Each of the original metadata documents is available for download, so all metadata are preserved, but viewing specialized fields may require downloading the full metadata document for a data package.